Father of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer says he forgives James Fields

A makeshift memorial of flowers and a photo of victim, Heather Heyer, sits in Charlottesville, Va., Sunday, Aug. 13, 2017. Heyer died when a car rammed into a group of people who were protesting the presence of white supremacists who had gathered in the city for a rally. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

By
Theresa Seiger, Cox Media Group National Content Desk

The father of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed Saturday amid racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, said he forgives his daughter’s accused killer.

“I can’t hate the man who did this to her because that would make me as bad as the people who did this,” Mark Heyer told the New York Post on Sunday. “As far as I’m concerned, he was deceived by the devil.”

Heather Heyer was killed when police said a car driven by Ohio man James Alex Fields Jr., 20, slammed into two other vehicles and ran down demonstrators who were protesting a rally organized by white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Fields’ former high school teacher, Derek Weimer, told CNN that Fields “was very big into Nazism. He really had a fondness for Adolf Hitler.”

He traveled to Charlottesville to take part in the Unite the Right rally, which was aimed at protesting the removal of a Confederate monument from the city’s Emancipation Park. The protest garnered the attention of Heather Heyer, who joined counterprotesters Saturday.